Oppen’s damningly faint praise helped encourage a view of Niedecker as “rural savant,” in Willis’s phrase, or “bumpkin-savant,” in Sorrentino’s. A perception of Niedecker’s life as “tiny” helped shape a critical consensus of her poetry as tiny—miniature, domestic, marginal. But to prove that her poetry is “big” doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding the impulse to read her poems as “biographical analogue,” as Penberthy has cautioned against. Rather, going deeper into her life, or any life for that matter, might prove how “big” in fact it was—how deeply Niedecker read, how much she saw, and how carefully she selected and arranged the facts of her life for her own poems.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 14:54:19 +0000
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